Oral Reading Behaviors in the Learning Disabled

The purpose of the study was to find out if there were differences between the linguistic cue use of thirty-six learning disabled children and that of forty-three normal children. Participants, after proceeding through a three-step process designed to equate error rate, read orally a version of a story written at eight levels of difficulty. The learning disabled children made proportionally more errors that marred sentence meaning and they did not correct serious meaning-change errors as much as control readers. By contrast, they used phonic cues more frequently than (but proportionally equal to) the normal children. These findings suggest that some learning disabled children may benefit from help in the use of context as a word recognition strategy.